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Article published In:
Scientific Study of Literature
Vol. 9:2 (2019) ► pp.195–229

Methodological issues in the study of phonetic symbolism

| Tel-Aviv University
| University of Haifa

There is a growing research literature on phonetic symbolism in poetry, sometimes with incongruent results. Through a theoretical structural analysis we show that, (a) individual speech sounds have (sometimes conflicting) potentials to suggest elementary percepts, such as abruptness, hardness, smoothness; and (b) from these elementary percepts some general psychological atmosphere may be abstracted that may be individuated in specific emotions as ‘love,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘anger,’ by semantic feature-addition. This proposal can reconcile incongruous research results. Sound-symbolic lexical entries are governed by similar principles, but fossilized. Large-scale statistical investigation may reveal significant sound-symbolic effects only when the same phonemes repeat throughout the poem. They may, however, miss conspicuous local sound effects, revealed only by local analysis. Some sceptical conclusions in the research literature may be due to this phenomenon. The proposed method may account not only for statistical correlations, but also for the perception of a pervasive emotional atmosphere in a poem.

Keywords: sound symbolism, iconicity, poetry, emotion
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • A welter of conflicting findings
  • A structural theory of phonetic symbolism
    • Organization of the mental database
    • The structure of emotions
    • The structure of phonemes
    • Principles of sound symbolism
  • The case of onomatopoeia
  • Accommodating conflicting findings
  • Objection to the present proposal
  • Non-reductive statistical investigation
  • Case studies
  • Theory adequacy and empirical results
  • Sound-symbolism and the lexicon
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19001.tsu
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